Here we come a wascrolling

by Jerrad Pierce

You've all been good little boys and girls this year haven't you?
Well, it's a special day regardless so you get your toy early this year:
Acme::Curses::Marquee1.
While Marquee is very easy to use, I've committed a faux-pas and essentially
stolen the sample code form the POD. However, I did make some adapations,
as well as discover a few fatal flaws in the code. You'll need to apply
this patch I submitted in a bug report to get it
working; I guess it really is an under-appreciated module, eh? I deviated from
the script somewhat though. I started by removing the seemingly pointless call
to getch(). This sent the marquee spinning like a top, at which point
I realized I could lose hacky curses calls an employ Time::HiRes's
usleep for more control over the scrolling speed.

If you'd like to get a feel for the results without the hassle of installing
the module and it's dependencies, then patching it, you can view a movie on a
vt100 comptaible terminal like so

if some combination of stty and cat doesn't do the trick
for you. You can adjust the speed by changing the baud rate (set to 3000 here),
and after you've gone through all the trouble of downloading that line of
code, or adjusting your TERM settings, you might be interested in some other
holiday cheer.

Finally, here's a slightly more portable version of today's example that uses
a pure perl implementation of FIGlet, by yours truly, and does not rely upon a
binary being in your PATH: mod18b.pl.

1. I've had an entry on my round tuit list to create an
Acme::Curses::Marquee::Extensions module since I first stumbled
across this little nugget when I was writing my first advent calendar two
years ago.